Opinion: With all the money and frequent flier miles in the world...
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What do shoe company moguls do with their free time? The Wall Street Journal finds out:
Late one spring afternoon last year, a mystery man sat in the back of a creative-writing seminar at Stanford. Evidently a student, he was much older than anyone else in the room. He was wearing a black blazer and white Nikes. He said his name was Phil. As the days passed, the man’s identity gradually came into focus. The instructor ‘made several vague allusions to Phil taking off in his private jet,’ recalls André Lyon, an English major enrolled in the class. And tales about Michael Jordan found their way into the man’s literary discourse. After a couple of weeks, a rumor began to circulate that the old dude in the Nikes was Philip H. Knight, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest sportswear company.
It’s hard to say which is more intriguing: The fact that a Nike exec wanted to be an English student, or the fact that he blended in so well.
He’s not the only high-profile personality to go undercover for higher ed. This summer, Shakira took classes at UCLA:
She enrolled in a history of Western civilization course under her middle and last names, Isabel Mebarak, telling clueless classmates she was just visiting from Colombia. ‘Oh, it was such a respite for me,’ Shakira recalls. ‘I felt that need to put a brake on everything, to escape from the celebrity life and reclaim a normal life for a while. It was very healthy for me.’
College: the new secret rehab.
You can’t blame stars for keeping educational endeavors below the radar. While some seem to do rather well by college, a la Julia Stiles, others find that their academic decisions become uncomfortably public, as happened with Mary-Kate Olsen’s leave of absence from New York University. Most, though, generally seem to view college as something to do before their careers take them off to new heights, similar to normal students taking a year off to travel before facing the real world.
Not all stars view college as just an academic feather in their celebrity caps — Network World profiles a range of actors, singers and others in show biz who come from uber-geeky backgrounds. For these Tinseltowners, such as chemical engineer Terrence Howard, returning to college means picking up a career that was set aside when the acting (or singing, or directing) bug bit.
On the whole, this seems like a social positive: Personalities are making college cool. Forget Kabbalah or exotic tatoos — now a pop princess can flaunt her B.A. in art history.